Seventeen words, and the war is never described. There is no battle, no named place, no body. Dave Bonta gives us only two things: a damaged pair of eyes and a group of people weighing whether to take a walk. The central idea is that the real mark of trauma is not the event but the way it reshapes the most ordinary choices. After the war, even going outside has to be considered.
The first stanza reads like a thought caught mid-flow. "over the war" has no subject and no main verb, and with no capital letter or punctuation it seems to begin before the poem does, as if the mind were already replaying something. "Over" is slippery. It can mean "about," it can mean "finished," and in a mind that keeps returning to the same thing it can suggest "over and over." Then comes the strangest phrase, "how it bled my eyes." We expect a wound to bleed, or a person to be bled. Here the war is the agent and the eyes are the victim. The poem doesn't say what this means, but judging by the imagery, eyes are how we take in the world, so damage there is damage to how everything afterwards will be seen. Colour may drain, or innocence of sight may go. The stanza ends on "afterwards," a single word alone on its line. The isolation works like a held breath: the white space around it is the aftermath.
The second stanza turns to "we" and to the present tense. The speaker is no longer alone, and the story has moved from what happened to what happens next. The verb is "consider," not "decide" or "go." It is polite and cautious, the language of people approaching something fragile. It also quietly returns to the eyes, since to consider something is to look at it carefully. What they consider is "going out walking / in the fields," about as gentle and everyday an act as a poem could offer. Yet the word "fields" carries a double charge in a poem about war, because fields are where pastoral calm lives and also where armies meet. The poem never says whether the fields promise healing or threaten a reminder. A reasonable reading is that they are both, and that this is exactly why the walk is only being considered.
The construction backs this up. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capitalisation, so nothing is tidied or concluded. The stanzas do mirror each other, though. Counting syllables, each runs four, five, three. The matching shapes set the two halves side by side, wound and tentative remedy, and in each the last line shrinks to a short phrase, "afterwards" and "in the fields," that trails off like a voice losing confidence. Sound adds a thread too. "War," "afterwards," "we" and "walking" all share the same opening mouth-shape. The sound that begins the violence also begins the faltering attempt at recovery, so the walk is shadowed by the war even at the level of pronunciation. Against that softness, "bled" is the one abrupt, hard-edged word, and it lands in the middle of the poem like a flinch.
The title matters a great deal. "Traumatized" is a clinical word, the vocabulary of diagnosis, and it looks oddly formal above lines so plain. Without it, a reader might take the second stanza as a quiet pastoral scene. With it, every detail becomes heavier, and the title does the naming so the poem doesn't have to. The gap between that technical label and the humble language of fields and walking is where the poem's feeling lives.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It refuses spectacle and trusts understatement, showing trauma as hesitation rather than horror. It also hands work to the reader, who must decide what the eyes saw, who "we" are, and whether the walk will happen. The poem stops without a full stop and leaves that question open, which is probably the most honest way to end it.